Thread by @TheUfoJoe

Drones, and the 2019 USS Omaha and USS Russell incidents?

@LueElizondo: "So if you wanted to launch something over a Navy ship that can hover over the flight deck as has been reported through the Omaha and the Kidd incidents, then you're talking about a drone capability that

https://twitter.com/zcichy/status/1446950713863536640

2 Lue: "is probably not a fixed-wing, long-range capability. It means it has to be launched from somewhere near by. Even two three miles, as far as you can with some of the more, if you will, commercially available, control systems. Even the best military systems you have some

3 Lue: "much longer capability, but you still have to launch them and you have to recover them, you don't just let them crash into the ocean because then they can be found, right? So they have to be launched from somewhere and they have to be controlled from somewhere by someone.

4 Lue: "And there's an infrastructure, a huge footprint, that is required to do that. You need a trained operator to do it, with enough juice where you can send out a signal to your quadcopter, your quadcopter can react and then enough, if u will, payload on this, so it can send

5 Lue: "the signal back to the operator. The operator knows where the drone is, it's looking at pictures & all that stuff, and then be able to fly the drone all the way back.

"So there's more practical challenges with trying to create something like that. If you're talking about

6 Lue: "a fixed-wing drone, that's a little easier but it's got to keep moving, it's got to be moving fairly fast, and it's not just going to stop and hover. So, therein lies the problem. If you want a loiter, you've got to launch it from relatively nearby. Now, the Navy has

7 Lue: "sea-domain awareness. They are the best at knowing anything that's in the ocean. These guys know. That's how we catch these drug runners coming in on these little tiny submersibles that you can barely see. There's a reason we catch them. So we know, if there's, let's say,

8 Lue "a Chinese frigate nearby that's launching drones, we know that. A lot of these ships have transponders on them, AIS. We know, unless they're squawking black, meaning they're not transmitting, then we have other ways 2 find out who's in our area & we have very high-fidelity

9 Lue: "radar systems and we have electro-optical systems. So, it's unlikely. I'm not saying it's impossible because the Chinese have harassed us before and vice versa with unmanned, aerial vehicles and aerial systems and by the way, that technology is improving, exponentially,

10 Lue: "almost every year, so at some point these things may have that capability that we're seeing, but right now, they don't, and that's the problem. The foreign, adversarial technology isn't where it needs to be for us to see the things that we're seeing, it's not there yet.

11 Lue: "It might be there in ten, fifteen, twenty years, but it's not there now."

That was the Jimmy Church interview from that online event. I'll have it up eventually.